Parents encourage young colts to dance. Dancing improves motor coordination, trains flight muscles, and facilitates communication skills. When cranes dance in family units, they announce and share emotions. We suggest that dancing engenders a crane version of empathy.

For yearlings and second-year cranes on staging areas, the act of dancing refines their postures, steps, sequences, and routines. Dancers size-up one another: same-sex dancers compete, but between the sexes dance is flirtation.

The courtship dances of mated pairs promote hormonal changes that hasten reproductive maturation. In staging ares, crane pairs jump, bob, and bow to one another. On nest territories, the pairs face-off at the outset and then often circle as they respond to each other in an emotional postural conversation.

An excellent Field Guide to Crane Behavior can be downloaded as a pdf from the International Crane Foundation. For our dictionary of crane body language, we are especially indebted to the "Sociogram" of Ellis and colleagues and also to others referenced below. In 2011, Waterford Press published our Sandhill Crane Display Dictionary 4.

We welcome emails that suggest improvements/corrections for this dictionary.

Head low, bare-skin- expanded, with wings held close or spread. Bowing is used for threat, often after alighting in a group of cranes (left photo). It follows copulation as shown above right and in drawingby. Ellis et al.2 who call it a "Hoover" (resembling a vacuum cleaner).

While dancing, cane stabs at the ground, grabs and pulls up a bit of plant material, and jumps at abn extreme backward angle while waving the vegetation. In this picture, the male was dancing with a colt.

While turning quickly, the crane extends the outside wing and pulls inside wing against body.
In left photo above, Millie (ruffled) spins clockwise toward Roy's Jump-rake.
Above to the right is a 2-month colt. Directly right is a gangly 3-week colt.
Click on photos to see contexts.

Crane faces forward, body angled slightly up and head high, with wings held wide and cupped. Tthe crane takes a few steps forward, holding out each leg straight from the knee to the base of the toes as the bird high-steps, like a soldier in a ceremonial march. This display is also used as a threat.

Neck arched with bill pointing up.
In Sandhill Cranes, the wings are lifted and spread. A rare display for Sandhills and one that reflects high arousal. Roy, in the left photo, had arrived after migration to his traditional nesting territory just a few minutes earlier. Click for hyperlink to context.

In Red-crowned (Japanese) Cranes, arching is the iconic threat behavior often seen after a crane lands in a crowd of others. Red-crowned Cranes cup the wings inward and back over the body (photo above and drawing3).

Roy turns (tour) by jumping, usually taking three 120° jumps (jeté) for full rotatation. Roy usually looks into the turn. He rotates either clockwise (left three images show one jump-up, the landing, and the next jump-up over 1 second elapsed time) or counter-clockwise (right two images show a jump-up and the landing).
Click on images for hyperlinks to the dances.

The display seqeunce is names for an advanced ballet move. Tuck-bobs may be interspersed between jumps.

The graceful circling of a pair with their wings extended. Other displays like Tuck-bob, Jump-rake, and Single-wing-spin may be interspersed as the pair rotates. Click on pictures for the hyperlink to the full dance sequence.

In the midst of a dance, one of the pair may retreat and then rush back running, flapping, jumping, and gliding. According to Ellis2, this is mostly a female display and indeed Millie is shown in this photo. This high arousal display is rare.

The three photographs are sequential; total elapsed time less than a second. Click on any photograph for the full context.